Windswept and interesting, the spectacle of the venerable old man of Northumbria, Bamburgh Castle, cannot help but stoke the imagination. Enthroned upon a rearing dais of sub-volcanic rock, the Castle rises rugged yet regal over the village that bears its name and the wild iron blue sea. Its roots reaching deep into the formless rolling fog of Britain’s ancient past, Bamburgh Castle is built about the fossilised heart of a primordial kingdom. Emerging from the whirling, scrambling mêlée of shattered Sub-Roman Britain’s dusk and the marauding Saxon dawn, ageless Bamburgh taken with fire and sword was the grain of sand around which a pearl coalesced.
The Kingdom of Northumbria, high water mark of Germanic conquest within Britain, was for a time the most powerful kingdom in the Saxon Heptarchy holding sway over all others. The soon Christianised Northumbrian monarchs from their seat, the mighty fortress of Bamburgh, oversaw a great flourishing of monastically driven scholarship and literature, transmuting a backwards kingdom on a half-forgotten and benighted island into one of Christendom’s great strongholds of learning and culture. Yet all things come to an end, the dynasties and people of Northumbria changed under waves of settlement and conquest, its definitions became blurred until it was subsumed into the newly awakened England. While Northumbria was largely washed away, clinging onto the peripheries of peoples’ identity, the craggy robust grandeur of Bamburgh Castle rose up to mark its passing, carrying and expanding its legacy down the ages.
The site of the current Castle, like many of Britain’s most iconic and enduring fortresses, seems to have served as a stronghold almost since time immemorial; archaeological evidence pointing to the presence of an extensive Celtic settlement and fortification by the Votadini tribe. During their extended efforts to tame and reshape Britain, throughout their centuries of settlement and cultural conversion, the Romans constructed a watch tower on the site, a link in a vast chain of coastal defences. From these murky origins the history of the Castle swims into view when in 547 it was wrested from the grasp of the local Briton Kingdom, which had sprung up to fill the power vacuum caused by the withdrawal of Roman troops, by the evocatively titled Anglo-Saxon warlord Ida Flame-Bringer of Bernicia. Here Ida established the centre of his hard won domain which was to play a pivotal role in the Saxons ongoing and bitter struggle for dominance under the auspices of the royal inhabitants of Bamburgh.
Bamburgh Castle